So if you aren’t in a contest or giving a performance, what do you see as the difference, if any, between yoyoing and practicing yoyoing? Does one feel qualitatively different to you compared to the other?
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I’ve never given it much thought but I’d never say practicing. I’m overly competitive with enough other things in my life and I want to keep the yo-yo out of that realm. Everyone probably has their own interpretation but “practicing” reminds me of training.
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Well, to use myself as an example, I do nothing but practice. I haven’t mastered much yet, so practically every throw I make is a practice throw, aimed at getting good enough that I can land a trick almost on autopilot.
You’ll get better either way, as long as you’re doing it. And honestly it’s probably just a matter of semantics because doing either should make you more consistent. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make progress. I still want to make progress myself, and I never want to stop. I just prefer to keep it more organic I guess, basically a “wherever it takes me” mentality vs “I must get better”. All that being said, I was in your boat when I started. Everyone wants that deep bag of tricks, it’s normal
To me yoyoing is doing tricks and combos you already know. Practice is when you’re learning new tricks, creating new tricks.
I started improving a lot more slowly when I started “yoyoing” and stopped “practicing” as you call it.
I noticed that as I got better and better the less I wanted to practice, the more I learned the more satisfied I felt doing what I already knew.
When I was first starting, practice and yoyoing almost felt like the same thing to me because I didn’t really have a hat of tricks I could just pull from to mindlessly yoyo. I also enjoyed practicing a lot more when I was a beginner. I started to enjoy it less the better I got.
I started yoyoing a lot less towards the end of high school because I was losing interest and basically didn’t do it at all my freshmen year of college. I wanted to get better but I hated practicing.
And yoyoing is one of those things that you actively have to keep “practicing” and learning to get better, it’s not like some other stuff where you’ll just get better the more you play.
If I spent half the time I did just casually yoyoing on practice, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d be at the level of a national finalist by now.
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For me yoyoing is when you aren’t thinking about what you’re doing with the yoyo, practicing is when you’re refining existing tricks to be faster/cleaner/flow-better-ier, and building/creating/spelunking/exploring YEAH let’s go with exploring is when you’re trying to expand your trick vocabulary by making some cool new tricks. That’s a different experience from learning, though, which is trying to find out how to do an existing trick. To me those are the main four schools of yoyo.
When you do something that is skill based repeatedly you are practicing whether you mean to or not. It just is.
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I guess I would look at when I’m actively learning a new trick, doing it repeatedly as practice. Then when I’m just throwing watching TV I wouldn’t necessarily consider it practicing.
I can’t really divorced the two. I’m not a competitor and don’t ever intend to be a competitor, but whether I’m just casually throwing over well-worn territory or learning a new trick, I’m constantly trying to smooth things out. Challenging myself to make things look cleaner.
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I take it as a fairly good sign that I will practice for what seems like a few minutes and not realize that I just blew an hour on it. I have no sense of time when practicing because I am so focused on each throw. This is dangerous when I try to sneak in some practice before I have to be somewhere at a certain time (like work).
I feel I am making slow, but steady progress, which validates what little practice time I am able to put in. I’m gaining a little more confidence with basic binding, which is good because I am itching to go full unresponsive and start using my metal yoyos. I’ve been at this for nearly four weeks now, and about the fanciest thing I can do is this simple combo: trapeze -> unwind to a 1.5 -> back to trapeze -> unwind to a side undermount -> bind return. I’m not super consistent with it yet, but it’s getting there.
Double or Nothing is my next Mt. Everest…
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